> Also sets a horrible precedent that you can hold the company ransom over stolen code to get a job if nothing else!

He did ask for a job, but the article doesn't say anything about him ransoming the code!

It really sounds to me like he just wanted to play Half-Life 2.

That used to be a running joke within the original hacker (NOT startup-hacker) community

When I was in high school, in the Before Times[1], a guy who ran in my hacker circles broke into the school system's mainframe and gave everyone he liked straight A's. He was, of course, caught -- but the school system really did hire him after he graduated, as their IT security guy.

[1] This was before the internet, before there were laws specifically about this sort of thing, and before the public started mistakenly equating "hacker" with "criminal".

I broke into some systems at my high school, and got hired jr/sr year at my school district. Their issue was a permission misconfiguration in AD, and allowed me to do all sorts of things like adjust the backgrounds for all the computers in the district

I thought it'd be an interesting entry into tech jobs, specifically around microsoft AD, which was something I never got to really play with enough at home (licensing, and hardware limitations)

They ended up just using me to re-image and setup machines :(

I also broke into the systems in college, but I was so anxious/scared about the whole ordeal I didn't dare to disclose the vulnerabilities I found.

I figured it could go both ways: either my career as IT student was over, or they would thank/praise me for it. I figured it wasn't worth the risk.

I got caught defeating computer protections in high school. They gave me a job. It helps that I used my elevated access to fix the printer so I could print without moving to another computer.

Gaining illicit access to systems lost the appeal when I realized they’d just grant the access if they trusted you not to screw it up. That was the end of my hacking and beginning of my career.